The "Here's what I'm reading in grad school" thread.

Discussion in 'Education and Academia' started by Jacen McCullough, Sep 9, 2009.

  1. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland
    Howdy folks. Back when I was in undergrad and getting ready to student teach, I made a thread to kind of blog about the student teaching experience. Now that I'm starting grad school (MA in English Lit at Saint Bonaventure University), I thought it might be neat to post the books/stories/essays etc that I am reading as part of the program. If I post it to this thread, that means that I've already read it (so no fears about fishing for homework answers from this lit nerd!). I'm wrapping up my second week, and these are my classes this semester:

    Research Methods and Bibliography
    Movements in American Lit (focusing on Concept Lit/Art)
    Brit Lit of the 17th Century
    Latin I (for FREE!)

    So far, the reading has come from the two inside classes (Research Methods has mainly been living in the library and making note cards for a number of research texts, and Latin has been basic 101 stuff that requires little thought).

    17th Century Brit, we've read Milton's Areopagitica, some essays by Bacon (Of Truth, Of Marriage and the Single Life, and both versions of Of Studies). We also read Bacon's Aphorisms, and a number of the character writers (The Overburian Character, John Earle's Microcosmography and Nicholas Breton).

    We kicked off the Conceptual lit class by reading John Cage's Silence and I STILL have a headache from the experience!

    I thought I was going to despise the AmerLit class, but even though the reading has been WAY outside my comfort zone, the class itself has been fascinating.
     
  2. royalstilton

    royalstilton Member

    Aug 2, 2004
    SoCal
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I had English Lit 1660-1735 ( i think those were the dates ). The most dire experience I've ever had. If I had been fortunate enough to be assigned Areopagitica, I would have been a happy camper, but instead, we had fun with Restoration Comedy, which I didn't like so much.

    I had two years of Latin in HS. Loved it.
     
  3. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Silence is one of my favorite books. I've assigned it to undergraduates in three different courses over the years, and it's worked pretty well (now, when I played examples of Cage's music... that was a different story).

    What else are you reading in that class?
     
  4. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland
    I know we'll be reading Burrough's Word Virus, and I've already read about half of it. I left my syllabus in my office, though, and I can't remember the rest of the reading list beyond that (I really wasn't too familiar with anything on the reading list. I'm more of an Early/Modern Brit Lit person, Modernism and Conceptual American stuff is way outside of my previous experience).
     
  5. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    That's actually right up my alley. I might be teaching Burroughs next semester, assuming we can get the dept head to approve my Beat Generation class.
     
  6. uclacarlos

    uclacarlos Member+

    Aug 10, 2003
    east coast
    Club:
    FC Barcelona
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    Thread-jack:

    Why would they not approve it? "Special Topics" not an option?
     
  7. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    1) projected enrollment for required major classes.

    2) projected enrollment for required gen ed classes.

    3) PA still doesn't have a budget and we're a state-related institution.

    4) I'm an adjunct and if someone on a tenure track wants to teach it, they get to.

    5) some people are still pissed about the time I gave a class benezidine when we were discussing Kerouac's On the Road and we pretty much kept at it for 48 hours straight and three people were hospitalized and one died, we think.
     
  8. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland

    Working on your William Tell routine again, eh? :)

    The conceptual/American Lit class is an odd one. In terms of the content, I've hated almost everything we've read (and I absolutely loathed Word Virus). However, due to the enthusiasm of the professor, the class has also been one of my favorites. After Cage and Burroughs, we worked with Robert Lax (probably lesser known. Bonaventure has his papers, which is probably why we read him), minimalist Aram Saroyan, and some of the 2nd Generation New York Schoolers (particularly Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer). I've really enjoyed the 2GenNYSch folks. Joe Brainard's work with Nancy cartoons had me rolling, and I may actually write my seminar paper on Berrigan's Sonnets (specifically the influence of the Renaissance on the 2nd Gen. NYSers in general, and Berrigan in particular. A number of his Sonnets show Renaissance influence, although none quite so blatant as #88, which is half composed of Prospero's lines. If anyone's interested, I'll post more of the argument once I've spent some quality time in the library.


    Latin is still Latin, Research and Bibliography was crazy busy for the first two months, and now we can breathe again.

    17th Century- We finished up the section on prose (I think I already mentioned Bacon and Milton). We ended up reading Browne, Donne, Burton, some of the character writers (Overburian, Lady Cavendish and a few others) and some really odd journal entries from Lady Margaret Hoby.

    We moved into verse a couple of weeks ago. So far, we've looked at Donne, Ben Jonson, Herbert and a few others. I'll post more on that later (syllabus is in my office and I need to check this week's reading anyways).

    I'm currently juggling four papers, so I might not get to that later update until LATER later! I have the 20-page Berrigan paper, a 10 page Cultural/publishing heritage paper, a descriptive bibliography paper, and an OED paper for 17th Century (I have to pick any work from our text, find ten words that had a significantly different meaning in the 17th C. and use those words to conduct an explication. It actually sounds like a lot of fun, I just have to find a good work to pick apart first. We can't choose anything we've read in class).

    I scheduled for next semester. I'll be taking Literary Criticism, Compositional Theory, and Middle English Lit.
     
  9. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland
    Well, I am now officially 25% of the way finished with my M.A.

    Overall, I REALLY enjoyed this semester.

    The 17th Century Brit Lit class was my favorite. The prof was absurdly intelligent in his field (while writing a paper on the multi-valent readings of Ben Jonson's "An Ode. To Himself," I kept on running into articles published by the prof of the class).

    Research and Bib was also a lot of fun- though the weather ended up preventing us from our intended paper making party (We were going to get together and make paper, old school style). I ended up writing my seminar paper on the state of publishing in 1940 America, which was far more interesting than I thought it would be (there was a lot of optimism in publishing in 1940, particularly with the 400th "anniversary" of the Gutenberg press, but that year ended up as a sort of eye of a hurricane--it was one small moment of calm surrounded on either side by industry changing events--the Great Depression and WWII).

    I really didn't expect to like the conceptual American poetry class, but it turned out to be somewhat interesting. I still despise Burroughs, and I thought Hannah Wiener was like a tripped out, literary version of Luna Lovegood, but I really loved the microfiction of Lydia Davis (who I got to chat with online at the New Yorker website yesterday!) and I thought Cage, Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer's work was thought provoking. I ended up writing my paper on Berrigan's connection to the Renaissance. I argued that his style of creating a verbal mosaic in a loose sonnet form was the result of taking the idea of Renaissance florilegium, and applying the theories of abstract expressionism, and the compositional approaches of Cage (chance operations) and Burroughs (the cut up method). My conclusion was that Berrigan took the sonnet to its next logical step (a step wished for in William Carlos Williams' introduction to his late work The Wedge), which was a truly "free" verse, absent the clumsiness of a central author, yet still retaining meaning through the selection of the components.

    I presented that paper last night, and then slept for 12 hours! I already heard from my 17th century professor, who wanted to let me know that I scored an A in the class (on the strength of a 97% on both the poetry exam and the Jonson paper-- I had been concerned, because I did not do as well on the prose exam--I just didn't "get" the prose as quickly as I did the verse for some reason). I'm still waiting to see the grades for the other two courses (particularly the American class, as that Berrigan paper accounts for 70% of the final grade!)

    On the whole, I am REALLY loving graduate school. Next semester:

    Latin 2
    Compositional Theory
    Literary Criticism/Theory
    Lit of the Medieval Period
     
  10. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland
    On a side-note, one of the sources I found for the Berrigan paper included an interview of Kerouac that appeared in the Paris Review. Berrigan, Aram Saroyan and another poet (though mostly Berrigan) interviewed Kerouac. The most amusing passage was the part where Kerouac claimed to have been Shakespeare in a former life, and he and Berrigan created a sort of freestyle impromptu sonnet (the interview took place about 5 years after Berrigan wrote The Sonnets but just before they were actually published).
     
  11. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    There is an overdose of the faux "humanities" grad students among BS scribblers, it seems. Too much of the eating of the Lotus; not enough of hardscrabble engagement with making sense of this Universe in which we are born, and will live, and will die. Too much Derrida crap, not enough Feynman.

    In any case, as a counterpoint to all the pomology or other dreck many of you seem to be engorging on, here are three papers I've been reading in the last month:
    "Subelliptic Boundary Value Problems and the G-Fredholm Property", by Joe J Perez
    "Constructive Function Theory on Sets of the Complex Plane through Potential Theory and Geometric Function Theory", by Vladimir Andrievskii
    "Complex manifolds and mathematical physics" by R.O. Wells

    Enjoy.

     
  12. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland


    Feel nice and superior now? Good to get it out of your system?

    Bottom line- To each their own. I would not thrive in a mathematics/science/medical program. I'm not wired that way. Conversely, math/science/medical folks would not thrive in my field. If you want to discuss mathematics, start a thread. Odds are pretty good that you'd get better discussion doing that than you will jumping into an existing thread and behaving like an ass.

    And for the record, I can't stand theory (and it thankfully seems to be losing its luster in the field).
     
  13. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Apparently, the Berrigan et al. interview was much livelier than that published version. Once the speed kicked in, Kerouac really started dishing. Or so I was told by Andrei Codrescu: Berrigan lost the tapes at some point, but I've met a couple people who claim to have heard it.

    Hope you did well on the Berrigan paper. Sounds like a good idea.


    It's very clear you're incapable or reading either, so quit trolling until you can prove otherwise.

    I'll be curious what you cover in your theory class next semester. As to its luster-loss, it seems that way to me, too: I think one reason theory insinuated itself in literature departments was because most philosophy departments in American universities became almost exclusively analytical, as opposed to continental. There were a lot of interesting philosophers on the continent (many of whom never made headway in the states, who probably should be more widely read), but you'd never know that looking at an American graduate program.
     
  14. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    [1] It ain't about niceness, nor about superiority, and it's certainly not about purging systems. It's about the astonishing narrowness existing in a thread that asks for insight into what is being read in graduate school.

    [2] I do not presume to claim you could not thrive in math/science. That is your own judgement. Do not presume that folks in the sciences [mathematical or otherwise] could not thrive in your field. Unless of course they would not thrive because people like you would make sure they would not be allowed to thrive.

    [3] Of course I enjoy discussion on physics or mathematics. It would be hard to study if not. But I'd also enjoy a more broadly envisioned discussion as to what is read in graduate school [perhaps even a discussion of to what aim these works are read; and what they bring to, or help bring out of, the student].
    To set out a thread welcoming discussion on what is read in graduate school, and then deciding it is to be kept as tribal lands for the natives of McCosh or Peabody halls, is -- to put it mildly-- behaving like an ass.

    [4] All well and good: the capacity to learn from disastrous consequences has not been completely eradicated in graduate schools of the humanities or social studies. That bit of cheer will surely warm up the New Year.
     
  15. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Quote: Dr. Wankler:
    Originally Posted by TheLostUniversity [​IMG]
    Too much Derrida crap, not enough Feynman.

    "It's very clear you're incapable or reading either, so quit trolling until you can prove otherwise."

    Now if that is the sort of "insight" you offer, and if you are in fact one of those "professing" in academia, then I pity those students who have you for a troll.

    You care to discuss Feynman or Derrida, and what role they may play in your, or others, engagement with deepening human understanding [in graduate education or otherwise] ? Or are you all ill-logic and bluster? On the Margins of [your] Philosophy do you have the stomach for an integral path through quantum mechanics?
     
  16. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Thank you, bigsoccer:

    This message is hidden because TheLostUniversity is on your ignore list.
     
  17. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland

    Just a quick point before you get ignored: What you wrote in point [1] proves that I'm right about point [2]. This thread has NOTHING to do with "asking for insight into what is being read in graduate school." NOTHING. This thread is what I am reading in graduate school. Since I am in a graduate program for English literature, it should be no surprise that no math or science texts are on the list. It should also be no surprise that those math and science texts aren't being discussed in this thread. You know, the thread about what an ENGLISH LIT grad student is reading.
    Reading comprehension is the most basic skill in my field. You've failed that skill in this thread, thereby proving that you would not thrive in my field. Ta.
     
  18. uclacarlos

    uclacarlos Member+

    Aug 10, 2003
    east coast
    Club:
    FC Barcelona
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    I won't get into the degree to which TLU was/is dismissing graduate studies in fields that incorporate critical theory, but I would just like to point out that what confuses the issue is that crit theory uses jargon that is similar enough to everyday speech to the point that it becomes difficult to divorce theory from everyday speech.

    And this gets complicated by the fact that theoretical terms get incorporated into popular speech quite frequently.

    This past election cycle, the word "narrative" made the transition from literary studies to normal, everyday word.

    When scientific words make the transition, they retain a large part of their scientific meaning, or at the very least it is very easy for a non-scientist to trace it back to a hard science.

    but how many talking heads could discuss the failings of McCain's narrative AND be able to discuss a post-colonial reading of the Russian Formalists (that instead of propping up the regime they were actually disengaging from it)?

    I will never pick up a math or physics journal and diss the titles and their audacity to use "jargon" that I don't understand.

    But make no mistake: academic journals in all disciplines are full of jargon. Too bad that humanities academese is camouflaged.

    :D

    Ooops.

    Thanks indeed to BigSoccer. :D
     
  19. minorthreat

    minorthreat Member

    Jan 1, 2001
    NYC
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    Tell me about it. Columbia's crown jewel in the literature department is Gayatri Spivak, and I just find her utterly incomprehensible.
     
  20. minorthreat

    minorthreat Member

    Jan 1, 2001
    NYC
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    Why is it that people in the hard sciences feel a need to badmouth the humanities or social sciences (except for, of course, economics, which has just enough math to be considered "scientific")? It's almost never the opposite way around - in fact, if you took a straw poll of humanities grad students, I think the overall consensus would be something to the effect of "I like science, but that's just not where my talents lie." Granted, there are some theorists in the humanities that have pseudoscientific pretentions that ruffle the feathers of those actually in the hard sciences, but tarring all of us with the same brush is grossly unfair.

    Furthermore, your use of Feynman as an example is highly ironic, because he himself embraced the humanities - while he admittedly didn't have much use for literature or philosophy, he dabbled quite extensively in art, music, and linguistics, and one of his most famous speeches ("Cargo Cult Science") is rooted just as much in anthropology as it is in physics.
     
  21. Jacen McCullough

    Nov 23, 1998
    Maryland
    Spivak may be the crown jewel, but I have a total man-crush on James Shapiro.
     
  22. minorthreat

    minorthreat Member

    Jan 1, 2001
    NYC
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    Did he do his PhD under David Bevington? That guy was pretty much the surrogate grandfather of every actor at Chicago, self included.
     
  23. uclacarlos

    uclacarlos Member+

    Aug 10, 2003
    east coast
    Club:
    FC Barcelona
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    1. They don't understand it
    2. Overlap of theoretical terms w/ popular speech, and nuance is a bitch
    3. I think it started when philosophy and theology shifted away from science. Up until the early 20th century, any philosopher or theologian worth his salt was up-to-the-minute w/ scientific advances. Nowadays, that is no longer the case, although it seems to be shift back with Religious Studies and the environment. But that's just one small exception.

    Linguists ruled 20th century thought. (Please permit the slight exaggeration.)
     
  24. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States

    So, Dr. Wankler was all bluster. There's a shocker.
     
  25. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    [1] Yes, I see you have Dr. Wankler's capacity to engage in discourse which is other than simple hosannas for the fetishes of the tribe. Critical thought, for sure. :rolleyes:

    [2] A point on writing, and on the reading of that writing.
    Here is the title you gave the thread: "The "Here's what I'm reading in grad school" thread."

    As you may note, you did NOT title it: "Here's what I'm reading in grad school". Had you done so, then you would be correct in saying that I had misread the thread's title when I presumed it to refer to a discussion on what people [here on BS] are reading in grad school.
    However, as you could see if you had not decided that hiding was the better part of intellectual valor, what you actually set out as the title puts these words into the mind of its reader "oh, here is a thread for what I am reading in grad school". Which interpretation, by the way, is consistent with what sort of responses you had on the thread.
    If you had need of an example you could appreciate, were you --poor Jacen-- not so fearful of all outside the tribe, consider the distinction between:
    [a] "Here's who I've a total mancrush on in grad school"
    "The "Here's who I've a total mancrush on in grad school" thread"

    [3] Yes, it really is.
     

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